Friday, June 7, 2013

Flashback Friday: Atari

Remember this?

Remember this?

If you don't, then get the hell outta here you little punk! I want only us old-timers who remember Atari and Pong to reminisce. Who needed Candy Crush or Angry Birds when you can hit a slowly moving pixel square back and forth for hours. Graphics, smaphics...two small vertical lines, a pixelated dotted line and a tiny white square was technology at it's finest. Our pre-mobile devices brains could only handle so much back then.

Our medulla oblongata started developing beyond the simple concept of trying to get a square past your opponents vertical line and we progressed to more complex games like Breakout and my personal favorite - Pitfall:

Eventually we began thinking we were expert video gamers by trying to trick the system. Case in point, the game E.T. The Extra Terrestrial, has gone down in history as one of the worst video games ever. People found it hard to understand. Falling into those damn pits was monotonous and virtually hard to get out of them. But you know what? my siblings and I figured that game out so fast that we got bored with it and started finding ways to have E.T.'s space ship get stuck on earth (basically kill E.T. on the landing spot and have Elliott go to E.T. to revive him right when the space ship lands, the space ship will get stuck and the game crashes - genius right?).

I'm sure when my kids are old enough they will see what their parents used to play back then and laugh uncontrollably, but I know that we were revolutionaries back then and that little simple Pong game started the whole app craze that we all get obsessed about now. So thank you little white pixelated dot for making it happen.

4 comments:

I have a friend who bought an updated version of the Atari console. It looks exactly like the old one but there are no game cartridges...all the games are programmed in the console! So it's not too late to introduce the kids to it!

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